Ethereal-dev: [Ethereal-dev] Disabling GTK-Wimp on older versions of Windows, to avoid errors

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From: Guy Harris <gharris@xxxxxxxxx>
Date: Mon, 28 Jun 2004 02:43:16 -0700
On Thu, May 13, 2004 at 11:33:10AM +0100, Graham Bloice wrote:
> I did try using gtk-wimp on an NT4 system and got a command prompt with tons
> of entries such as:
> 
> 'Couldn't load font "MS Sans Serif 8" falling back to "Sans 8"'
> 
> There were many, many entries when opening menu's etc, that took a lot of
> CPU cycles (100% CPU for > 5 seconds when opening the Edit | Preferences
> menu on a PII 400).  Removing the gtk-wimp stuff fixed this.
> 
> In the light of this I think that the installer shouldn't install the
> gtk-wimp stuff on NT4.

I had the exact same experience; I didn't see any bugs filed about that
on the GTK-Wimp SourceForge site.

A Google for

	"gtk-wimp" nt4

found:

	http://www2.arnes.si/~sopjsimo/gimp/faq.html

which says:

	o I installed Gimp 2.0 on Windows 9x/ME or NT 4, and I'm getting
	  a lot of messages saying ** (gimp-2.0.exe:4294830849): WARNING
	  **: Couldn't load font "MS Sans Serif 8" falling back to "Sans 8". 
	  What should I do?
	o You have two options:
	     o Go to Control Panel->Display properties->Apperance tab, and
	       set all fonts to Tahoma (or any other TrueType font).
	     o Uninstall GTK+ 2.2.4, then re-install it without the GTK-Wimp
	       component. 

and a Google for

	"gtk-wimp" "ms sans"

found

	http://mail.gnome.org/archives/gtk-app-devel-list/2004-January/msg00443.html

which says:

	From: "Rastatter, Ken (OH32)" <Ken Rastatter Honeywell com> 
	To: "'gtk-app-devel-list gnome org'" <gtk-app-devel-list gnome org> 
	Subject: RE: Error selecting font with gtk-wimp engine and win98 
	Date: Fri, 30 Jan 2004 09:23:11 -0700 

	Goran Rakic wrote:
	> If I choose some other font (Tahoma) in Display properties 
	> instead of default MS Sans Serif, application is working
	> as it should. MS Sans Serif is a .fon file and not TTF font,
	> maybe that can be a problem?

	You are correct. Pango can't deal with bitmap (.fon) fonts.

	Back in November, 2003 I submitted a GTK-Wimp bug report to 
	http://www.sourceforge.net/projects/gtk-wimp about this issue:

	[ 840287 ] Win98 warnings: Couldn't load font "MS Sans Serif 8"

	Since this is technically a Pango issue and not a GTK+ or
	GTK-Wimp issue, the GTK-Wimp bug was closed.  However, I've
	unable to find a Pango bug report about it.

	--
	Ken Rastatter

so it appears that the problem is that, at least in NT 4 (and perhaps in
some older versions of Windows OT, as I've seen this mentioned for W98
and possibly W95), the MS Sans Serif font is a bitmapped font, and Pango
can only handle scalable fonts.

The bug in question is at

	http://sourceforge.net/tracker/index.php?func=detail&aid=840287&group_id=76416&atid=547655

which says

	I think these warnings are generated because Pango can only work
	with TrueType fonts, not bitmapped fonts such as MS Sans Serif. 
	Out of the box, Windows 98 uses MS Sans Serif as the Caption
	Font, Menu Font, Status Font and Message Font.

	To make some of the warnings go away, you can use
	"Control Panel -> Display -> Appearance" to change the Menu Font
	to a TrueType font.

	These warnings do not appear under Windows 2000 because out of
	the box it uses the Tahoma TrueType font.

Presumably W95 also uses MS Sans Serif; we should probably disable
GTK-Wimp for W95 and W98, and, unless WMe uses Tahoma or some
other TT font for those system font purposes, WMe as well, and also
disable it for NT 4.0.